No End In Sight

The great-sonnet-read-through came to an official end last weekend when I finally arrived at the curious, but rather lovely, 154. Bit of a relief to get there, not due to any sense of achievement, but because the thought world of the sonnets is so uncomfortably obsessive so much of the time that there's a feeling of finally wrenching yourself away from the fascinatingly, dangerously weird guy at the party that you didn't really want to talk about life, the universe and everything with, but have somehow ended up doing so. Goodness me, WS was strange. As are we all.

The thing is though that in my Penguin edition of The Sonnets, editor John Kerrigan provides the full text of A Lover's Complaint (with excellent notes), the longer poem that accompanied the fourteen-liners in the original edition. He regards it as a neglected masterpiece and, four stanzas into it, so do I. Don Paterson mentions the Complaint in his critical commentary on the shorter poems but leaves it at that, so I'll no longer have his wonderfully engaging company as I read on, but read on I will. Which means I'm not really finished, and I still can't get away from the loquacious Will. Doh!